Linux.com reports on progress in Plasma, the new KDE 4 desktop. "If you visited the Plasma project's outdated website in past weeks, you might have got the impression that the team behind the project to revitalise the KDE desktop has not been up to much these past months. Delve into KDE's SVN repository, mailing lists, or the mind of lead developer Aaron Seigo, however, and you'll find a more exciting story."

Actually, it's 23rd of october, and it's not the next alpha, it's the final version.
According to the release schedule, the first beta is supposed to be tagged tomorrow, and probably released some days later.

I was wondering if there was ever any discussion about having kwin merge with plasma, perhaps becoming a plasmoid of sorts. Plasma would then be manager for the 'whole desktop' experience. It's not something I'm necessarily suggesting be done, I'm just interested if anyone knows of a link to any discussions about such a move?

I agree, though on a similar note I also wonder how easy it would be to integrate Plasma into apps. The most obvious reason would be to gain the power of plasma - an easy scripting language that can be integrated into sidebars. Another would be to remove duplication so, for example, the Amarok play sidebar could be put on the desktop easily.

Apart from that imagine an Unreal Tournament like desktop in a game where the desktop is plasma and the community can make plasma applets for it. I think there's lots of potential there.

At some points, the idea is'nt so bad. A fully scriptable enviroment, from the desktop over the icons to the applications up to the windows itself, it would be a dream to manage every aspect by the user itself, if want. The developer of a application, would have less work, and the features could gain rapidly from the community itself.

Well, but on the realistic side, this is actually only a dream. The Performance for this would lack like hell, and the design of the security and interfaces, need years of experience and work. Actually for example, kde is missing important global components.

It would be great if the Plasma site got Updated, adding all the Links to articles, moving all of the video's and podcasts or links to them on to it. Screen shots of what is going on. maybe some exclusive content. There is a plethora of info spreading out all over the net concerning Plasma. It would be great if it was funneled through the Plasma site maybe with an RSS feed as well. I have no clue how to even write a simple bash script much less create a website so I can only hope that someone out there with not only the desire but the ability could make it happen. If I could help in any way feel free to contact me. I have no problem doing what I can :)

It is really great to see progress in plasma project. For the past few weeks commit digest carries updates regarding plasma which itself shows how active the project is. Now I would like to request plasma team for an updated plasma website with progress of the project and also the roadmap. Thank you plasma team for your great work.

I was looking around the Plasma site and noticed that some of the links and the sites that they link to don't exist anymore....what ever happened to the appeal site? I remember going to that site a few times, I think the icon was a hand fan or something maybe it was supposed to be a peacocks tail but, it was like all gray.

someone mentioned this back in February:

>> On Monday 12 February 2007 17:52:42 Tim wrote:
>> You probably already know this, but the appeal.kde.org site redirects you
>> back to the kde home page. Is it supposed to do that?

Last I heard - yes, it has. Appeal was a project that in itself did not have any code in it - but rather was more of an organizational thing that had other components doing the work. We mostly just dropped the organizational overhead and work directly on the components at this point. At the time of inception, however, it was important to visualize these components working together.

>>According to Seigo, "By zooming out, users can get an overview of all the object groupings that they have made. These groupings may reflect the projects they are working on, be ways to keep different sets of files organized, etc. By hovering or clicking on one of these groups when zoomed out, users can either get a preview/snapshot of what is in the grouping, or zoom in on that grouping so that it is displayed full size on the physical screen. Thus we can offer much greater flexibility on the desktop layers while giving users visual context.

an updated website or wiki or a plasma that is ready for 4.0, you decide.

i'll get to the website as soon as i can, but the code is my priority right now. sorry, but the code is just slightly more important right now ;) it would be nice if the website wouldn't require any of my input/involvement to get up to date, but it's not rational to expect someone else to be able to know what to put there without input and consultation.